"He viewed collaboration as the beating heart of his laboratories, a sustaining resource that fueled the knowledge assets of his sprawling innovation empire," Caldicott writes in the book.

In a discussion with Design News, she told us about Edison's emphasis on collaboration. She also gave us four suggestions for innovative product design, based on Edison's approach.

Know your colleagues
Too often, design engineers put in their time and leave the office without sharing their ideas, or themselves, with their colleagues. "In a real collaboration, there should be a focus on learning from others and leveraging their strengths," she said.

The 10-12 members of Edison's team accomplished that by sharing a pool of common experience. They often returned to the lab after dinner and checked on ongoing experiments. Edison insisted that they share their notebooks with one another -- the better to understand how each team member's ideas fit in the grand technical plan. They also engaged in "midnight lunches," occasionally working deep into the night together and in many cases following no prescribed work schedule. Edison was a proponent of flex hours long before it became a corporate practice.

Caldicott insists that such methods create an important camaraderie. "When people share dinner and go back to work, it makes for a collegial environment. It's more than just a raw exchange of ideas. The team members become colleagues."

Encourage diverse viewpoints
Many engineering environments include large teams whose members come from similar backgrounds. Often such teams are made up solely of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, or software engineers.

Edison believed that homogeneous teams were less effective. When he was developing his incandescent light bulb, his team members included physicists, mathematicians, and chemists. He also brought in individuals with backgrounds in prototyping. "Sometimes, when teams of engineers get together, they are like minded. They speak the same language. But it's very important that they learn someone else's language and see the problem from their perspective."

Consider at least three options
It's tempting for engineering teams to lock in on one solution very early in the development process, but Caldicott encourages teams to consider multiple options. Edison often considered 10 or more ideas. For the incandescent bulb, he examined a dozen.

By approaching the problem in that way, team members engage more effectively and understand the big picture more thoroughly.

If you have a working rule of at least three options, it forces you out of your comfort zone. Teams need to explore. They need to understand which options are closer to the status quo and which are out there. Only by doing that can they begin to understand the boundaries of their problem.

Always consider the customer
One of Edison's few failures was the electric vote recorder, which he designed without sufficient back-and-forth discourse with users. From that failure, he learned a valuable lesson. "He realized that, when he didn't listen to customer needs, he failed."

When she speaks to technical teams, Caldicott is surprised to find how many engineers haven't learned that lesson. "Engineers tend to fall in love with their technologies, but you need to do the research. Visit the customer facility, look at trends, or talk to people who are using similar products. You should always take some time to find out what the customer's needs are."

Based on my own experience, collaboration is useful even if the other(s) involved have no clue what problem you are attempting to solve or how you are trying to solve it. I can't count how many times I've observed or experienced the ability to creatively solve a problem by simply talking it out with someone else. And in my experience, it doesn't seem to matter if collaboration is with a PhD or my 14 yr old daughter. Ideas build on ideas and when and the very act of having to convey the idea to someone else seems to spawn the next layer of ideas.

Collaboration can be a good or bad thing, depending on the collaborators and the reason for the collaboration. When a previous employer mandated "cross-functional development teams," it was an example of the bad kind. When the "collaborators" are assigned by management, to a product "we absolutely have to have" because the VP of marketing saw our competitor with it at a trade show, you're liable to get "design by committee" - no real originality because there's no real "buy-in". With no real "buy-in" you compete, not for credit for a successful product, but to avoid the blame for one you expect to fail.

On the other hand, when one seeks out collaborators of his own choosing, and they voluntarily help make his idea real, a great idea can turn into a great product very quickly. I'm an electronics type, and from the start I realized that I needed help... not in my own area of expertise, but in areas where I'm not expected to have much of a clue. I had my own "cross-functional team" long before it entered the lexicon of management buzzwords.

I'm not a software engineer, but my friend Ed is: Let's get his input on processor selection and I/O pin assignments. Let's both talk to Jim, in field service: what can we do, in hardware and software, to make his job easier? Jay's a mechanical engineer - he's got to mount the board, let's talk to him and to John, in industrial design, and make sure we're all on the same page before we start layout. Consult with Fred, in purchasing, before the BOM is finalized. Lean on Mike, in subassembly test, while I'm drawing the schematic, and Bob in board assembly while we're actually doing the layout. That collaboration led to what became a "cash-cow" product for that company.

Yes, I think it often depends on someone's mood or what type of person they are. Some people just don't like working with other people. I myself am a people person in general, so find collaboration very helpful. That said, in the work I do now, I work alone and in quite a solitary way, so collaboration doesn't come into play. But I'm not an inventor...so I would think bouncing ideas off of others definitely has its place. That's an interesting story about Edison! It's nice to think it's true...often it is people with no formal education who have the type of mind to think outside of the box.

I missed that article, but that ;position -- that collaboration isn't so wonderful -- is a contrarian point of view at this point. Boeing led the collaborative design movement in the late 199s by bringing suppliers into the design process. Now the automotive industry is hip deep in the water, sending tons of design to suppliers in collaborative joint efforts.

One of the interesting things Edison did to further collaboration was to choose each year a student or young engineer to come and work with him. In evaluating the potential, lucky student, Edison sought personality qualities over knowledge.

Rob, I don't think Boeing is a poster-child for collaborative design. The 787 was 2 years behind schedule because their suppliers could not execute, from fastener shortages, to build problems (in Italy), to steep learning curves in Japan.

The battery design that grounded the fleet would also not be a good example of supplier collaboration.

Yes, Liz, there's a lot more to Edison's succss than collaboration. One of the aspects not mentioned here is the work hours. Edison was notorious for working long hours, and even sleeping on his desk in the lab, using Watts' Dictionary of Chemistry as his pillow. When I visited Edison's lab in Fort Myers, FL, a couple of years ago, I saw that that lab had a cot. So, apparently, Edison slept in the lab at his vacation home, too. My guess is that it's a lot easier to collaborate with your workers when you're in the lab 20 hours a day.

Interesting story, Chuck! I doubt any true slacker ever came up with a great invention! And even great inventors need to sleep...he probably took cat naps in between great bouts of pondering and experimenting. :) Actually, when I shared an office in NYC I had a writer friend who used to have a pillow under her desk so she could take short naps between bursts of writing. It definitely gets the creative juices flowing to reset in between bursts of work, I think.

Earlier this year paralyzed IndyCar drive Sam Schmidt did the seemingly impossible -- opening the qualifying rounds at Indy by driving a modified Corvette C7 Stingray around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

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